Only about 6.6 million users are actually using Google+

Google+, the search giant’s ill-fated effort to compete with Facebook, is even worse off than you might think.

According to analysis by pseudonymous blogger Edward Morbius, of the supposedly 2.2 billion users on Google+, only a small minority — six per cent — actually use it with any regularity, and much of that activity is in the form of YouTube comments linked to their G+ accounts.

Google, which is reluctant to discuss user figures, has previously claimed to have 540 million monthly active users, although many of those users didn’t actually visit the social network and were only counted as users due to other Google products.

Morbius used a script to scan Google+ for account activity and, based on a sample of about 21,000 G+ accounts, found:

Only about 9 per cent of the 2.2 billion Google+ profiles have ever posted anything publicly.

For almost half of these “active” profiles, the most recent activities were YouTube comments that are linked to G+ accounts or changes to their profile photos.

Only six per cent of profiles that have ever been publicly active showed any activity in 2015, as of Jan. 18.

Excluding YouTube comments leaves only three per cent of all Google+ users who have publicly posted anything on the site in 2015, or about 6.6 million users. Morbius notes that there may be private posts and comments his analysis missed, “but it’s a pretty clear indication of the level of publicly visible activity on G+,” he writes.

Even with a larger sample size than what Morbius used, or if a large number of people use the site from now until the end of the month, it seems unlikely there are more than 10 million active monthly users still on Google+ in 2015.

Google+ launched in 2011 to much fanfare as a potential “Facebook killer,” based in part on the promise of greater privacy by limiting what contacts in different “circles” could see of your profile and your posts. However, a mass exodus from Facebook to Google+ never took shape, and today the social network limps on in diminished form, largely a repository of inactive user accounts that tie into other services like Gmail and YouTube.

Although there are some dedicated users who swear by the site’s clean interface and granular privacy controls, it likely missed its chance to replace or compete with Mark Zuckerberg’s blue giant.

As of Sept. 2011, Facebook boasts 1.35 billion monthly active users, and more than 860 million daily users. Twitter, which also suffers from a large number of abandoned accounts, has 284 million active users, according a financial filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.